send mail from linux terminal in one line
LinuxEmailLinux Problem Overview
I know there is the command mail
in linux to send emails via command line. How can I send an simple email with one line from the terminal though?
For example:
mail [email protected] [subject] [body]
And have the email sent without any confirmation or prompts to the user?
The reason is, I want to send a brief message via email to myself when a specific event happens in a java
program. The idea is that I will use Runtime.getRuntime()
… etc. to send the mail command
from my java
program.
I used cron
to do something similar in the past, but the current implementation doesn't use cron
, so I need to try this out instead.
Linux Solutions
Solution 1 - Linux
mail can represent quite a couple of programs on a linux system. What you want behind it is either sendmail or postfix. I recommend the latter.
You can install it via your favorite package manager. Then you have to configure it, and once you have done that, you can send email like this:
echo "My message" | mail -s subject user@gmail.com
See the manual for more information.
As far as configuring postfix goes, there's plenty of articles on the internet on how to do it. Unless you're on a public server with a registered domain, you generally want to forward the email to a SMTP server that you can send email from.
For gmail, for example, follow http://rtcamp.com/tutorials/linux/ubuntu-postfix-gmail-smtp/ or any other similar tutorial.
Solution 2 - Linux
You can use an echo with a pipe to avoid prompts or confirmation.
echo "This is the body" | mail -s "This is the subject" user@gmail.com
Solution 3 - Linux
echo "Subject: test" | /usr/sbin/sendmail user@domain.com
This enables you to do it within one command line without having to echo a text file. This answer builds on top of @mti2935's answer. So credit goes there.
Solution 4 - Linux
For Ubuntu users: First You need to install mailutils
sudo apt-get install mailutils
Setup an email server, if you are using gmail or smtp. follow this link. then use this command to send email.
echo "this is a test mail" | mail -s "Subject of mail" [email protected]
In case you are using gmail and still you are getting some authentication error then you need to change setting of gmail:
Turn on Access for less secure apps from here
Solution 5 - Linux
You can also use sendmail:
/usr/sbin/sendmail [email protected] < /file/to/send
Solution 6 - Linux
You can install the mail package in Ubuntu with below command.
For Ubuntu -:
$ sudo apt-get install -y mailutils
For CentOs-:
$ sudo yum install -y mailx
Test Mail command-:
$ echo "Mail test" | mail -s "Subject" [email protected]
Solution 7 - Linux
Sending Simple Mail:
$ mail -s "test message from centos" recipient@example.com
hello from centos linux command line
Ctrl+D to finish